Collingwood on metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1940.

Collingwood was concerned by attempts to eliminate metaphysics, by which he meant critical analysis of the philosophical assumptions that scientists and everyone else use as they go about their business of systematic thinking. He argued that if we lose the capacity to subject these assumptions to analysis then systematic thinking and hence science and civilisation will become impossible.

‘The sciences, both natural and historical, are at present in a flourishing condition. By means of heroic efforts they have succeeded in disentangling themselves from the fallacies of method that vitiated much of their apparent progress in the nineteenth century. Their prospects of advance along the lines upon which they have now established themselves are incalcuable. Internally, they have nothing to fear. The only dangers that now beset them are external'.

Defective metaphysics, and tragically deluded anti-metaphysicians are on the march.
'This is my reason for offering to the public what might seem essentially an academic essay, suitable only for readers who are already, like myself, committed to an interest in metaphysics. The fate of European science and European civilisation is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job and cackle I will'.

Collingwood framed his discussion in terms of the logic of question and answer, whereby “Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.” He then offers a number of propositions.

1. A question is logically prior to its own answer.

2. Every question involves a presupposition (and usually a large number of them).

3. The logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend upon the truth of what is supposed, or even on its being thought true, but only on its being supposed.

4. A presupposition is either relative or absolute.

He used the example of checking the accuracy of his surveyors' tape to show the attitude of a person who realises that the tape will tend to stretch in the course of use, in contrast with a person who uncritically assumes that the length is an 'absolute presupposition'.

"The business of logical inquiries, like that on which we are now engaged, is to study high-grade or scientific thinking: their conclusions are not impaired by the fact that low-grade or unscientific thinking also exists"

"...to speak of verifying a presupposition involves supposing that it is a relative presupposition" because absolute presuppositions do not lend themselves to verification or criticism.

Somewhere he wrote that absolute presuppositions do not raise the question of verification otherwise they would be relative and not absolute presuppositions.

Proposition 5. Absolute presuppositions are not propositions.

The categories of truth and falsehood do not apply to absolute presuppositions.

Nor are absolute presuppositions ever actually propounded;

"To be propounded is not their business; their business is to be presupposed. The scientist's business is not to propound them but only to presuppose them. The metaphysician's business, as we shall see, is not to propound them but to propound the proposition that this or that one of them is presupposed".

V The Science of Absolute Presuppositions (APs)

Introspection is not enough to get over the problems of defective Metaphysics because improved methods are required, which he calls ANALYSIS.

Scientists are likely to violently resist an invitation to examine their absolute presuppositions; here, in Collingwood's scheme, we encounter the limits of criticism (or justification); "APs do not need justification". Instead they need to be scientifically described.
However they tend to provoke "numinous terror" and so are hard to handle in an age that claims (falsely) to have no superstitions, hence no methods to dissipate the terror and face up to the source of it.

In the event of the eradication of metaphysics "...the eradication of science and civilisation will be accomplished at the same time". For more on this see chapter XIII.

VII The Reform of Metaphysics

Metaphysics will be reformed by consciously making use of the historical method, not the 'scissors and paste' history that Collingwood deplores. The proper historical approach will widen the scope of the subject and bring many new problems into view. The scope will widen to accommodate the absolute presuppositions of all eras, giving an infinite number of constellations of presuppositions.

We can then compare different constellations, and at the most interesting stage of all, "...find out on what occasions and by what processes one of them has turned into another".

PART II ANTI-METAPHYSICS

VIII What Anti-Metaphysics Is

Science and metaphysics are bound together and it makes no sense to suggest that knowledge will be advanced by the abolition of metaphysics. He is concerned to investigate the springs of anti-metaphysics, apart from defects in the programme and practice of people who explicitly concern themselves with metaphysics.

1. Progressive Anti-Metaphysics. If the work of professional metaphysicians becomes out of date and ceases to contribute to ordinary, non-metaphysical thought, then people such as scientists may come to think of metaphysics as a hindrance rather than a help.

2. Reactionary Anti-Metaphysics. People engaged in some kind of ordinary thought may be threatened by advances in metaphysics and so demand its abolition as a defence mechanism.

3. Irrational Anti-Metaphysics. There may be a more complex case where there is a move to abolish science itself, aiming at the elimination of systematic and orderly thinking in every form. In a civilisation where for some centuries rational thinking has been valued, such a movement would need to conceal its ultimate aim and operate under a disguise. Such a disguise may well be afforded by any existing movements of types 1 and 2, and better still by a confused mixture of both.

Progressive Anti-Metaphysics.

It is absolutely necessary that the work of metaphysics should be done for the sake of science and all other activities, however 'practical' and removed from academic discourse they may be.
Work on metaphysics can never be completed; it needs to be done piece by piece when the need arises.

The work of metaphysics is to ascertain whether certain presuppositions recently brought to light are absolute or relative. If the professionals do not keep up, then amateurs, including scientists, will have to do it for themselves but they are likely to resent the inactivity of the professionals.

'This resentment makes him think of his own metaphysical work not as a contribution to metaphysics but as an exposure of metaphysics; not as piece of help given by himself to metaphysicians in the pursuit of their own proper business, but as an attack on them and their business too'.

An example of progressive anti-metaphysics was Newton's warning against metaphysical hypotheses in experimental philosophy; this was done to forestall criticism of his own metaphysics which was an integral part of his own physics.

Reactionary Anti-Metaphysics

If professional thinking in metaphysics gets ahead of ordinary thought then the 'amateurs' are likely to take a stand against metaphysics at large. This is really a defence of outdated metaphysics. It is not really opposed to metaphysics (though it appears to be so);it is really opposed to advances in science and associated advances in metaphysics).

Collingwood offered an account of the rise of this attitude in the nineteenth century. He described this century as an age of metaphysical reaction where progress consisted of working out the consequences of ideas from the previous century with fundamental criticism and thus fundamental progress ruled out. For example James Watt's steam engine was not really improved for almost a century after 1796; people simply made bigger and more powerful engines at the same level of 7% efficiency.

Similarly Locke's ideas on the parliamentary system were simply reproduced without critical revision, especially without attention to the presupposition of nationality which persisted as an absolute when it should have been exposed as a relative (dispensable) presupposition.

Hence 'The things that were done in the nineteenth century in the name of nationality, the things that are still done today, at what expense of life and property I shall not try to estimate, are done for the sake of an eighteenth-century "metaphysical" idea'.

IX Psychology as Anti-Metaphysics

Collingwood disputed the claim that psychology is the subject that really tells us how we think, and so 'owns' metaphysics.

X Psychology as the Science of Feeling

Collingwood suggested that psychology came into being to investigate feeling which was not covered by the existing sciences of bodies or of minds. The sciences of mind such as logic and ethics he labels normative or 'criteriological' because they are self-critical and very much concerned with locating and correcting error. In contrast feeling has no element of self-criticism and so a science of feeling has nothing to offer the criteriological sciences.

XI Psychology as the Pseudo-Science of Thought

Collingwood suggested that psychology set out to capture the whole of the business formerly done by the sciences of thought. The critical period was the eighteenth century, an age of fanatical revolt, "a Rousseauesque age of nostalgia for the forest, a Humian age of reason as the slave of the passions, a Wordsworthian age whose prophets told their disciples to close up the barren leaves of science and of art".

He postulated that the great destructive task of the century was to liquidate Europe's debt to Greece; this was manifest in religious innovations and in the attack on biology which was the last refuge of teleological natural science (the science of the organism). Under this impulse biology was 'materialised' by the doctrine that organisms are nothing but complexes of material particles which operate according to mechanical principles. On this, compare Barzun’s critique of the heritage of Darwin, Marx and Wagner.


In the theory of knowledge the revolt took the form of maintaining that thinking is merely the aggregation of feelings, and thus a special case of sensation and emotion. In his view, if the new wave merely swept away the tyranny of ancient error then all might have been well but its own programme was wrong.


'When it is a case of overthrowing tyranny one should not be squeamish about the choice of weapons. But the tyranicide's dagger is not the best instrument for governing the people it has liberated. Epistemological materialism, in attacking the criteriological science of logic and offering to replace it by psychology, deliberately proceeded on the assumption that thought did not possess that power of self-criticism which had in the past been rightly regarded as distinguishing it from feeling'.


XIII The Propaganda of Irrationalism


This chapter depicts with chilling accuracy the process that occurs in many courses where the critical faculties of students are systematically destroyed. He first asks us to picture a civilisation where respect for truth is a powerful belief and systematic thinking is prized in intellectual and practical pursuits. Each feature of this civilisation would have characteristics derived from that prevailing habit of mind.


'Religion would be predominantly a worship of truth...Philosophy would be predominantly an exposition not merely of the nature of thought, action & etc. but of scientific thought and orderly (principled, thought-out) action, with special attention to method and to the problem of establishing standards by which on reflection truth can be distinguished from falsehood. Politics would be predominantly the attempt to build up a common life by the methods of reason (free discussion, public criticism). Education would be predominantly a method for inducing habits of orderly and systematic thinking'. And so on.


'And suppose that now within this same civilisation a movement grew up hostile to these fundamental principles...an epidemic disease: a kind of epidemic withering of belief in the importance of truth and in the obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way. Such an irrationalist epidemic infecting religion would turn it from a worship of truth to a worship of emotion and a cultivation of certain emotional states...Infecting politics it would substitute for the ideal of orderly thinking in that field the ideal of tangled, immediate, emotional thinking; for the idea of a political thinker as a political leader the idea of a leader focussing and personifying the mass emotions of his community'.


This movement of thought would need to proceed by stealth because the healthy tissues of thought would strongly resist any open attack on the springs of rationality and scientific thinking.


'Let a sufficient number of men whose intellectual respectability is vouched for by their academic position pay sufficient lip-service to the ideals of scientific method, and they will be allowed to teach by example whatever kind of anti-science they like, even if this involves a hardly disguised breach with all the accepted canons of scientific method.'


'The ease with which this can be done will be much greater if it is done in an academic society where scientific specialisation is so taken for granted that no one dare criticise the work of a man in another faculty. In that case all that is necessary to ensure immunity for the irrationalist agents is that they should put forward their propaganda under the pretence that it is itself a special science, which therefore other scientists will understand that they must not criticise'.


Collingwood was concerned about the impact of psychology at that time (pre-1940). Lately sociology has taken over the function he describes.


XIV Positivist Metaphysics


Early positivists such as John Stuart Mill were too interested in the validity of scientific thought to join psychology in its attacks on logic. But they were too easily satisfied as to the criteria of scientific validity. They perceived two stages in scientific inquiry, first ascertain facts, then classify them.


Their account of sensation in the ascertaining of facts failed to take account of the theoretical perspective required to make the process effective – Collingwood, perhaps unhelpfully, called this the “historical nature of facts”.


“In the second place it was rash of the positivists to maintain that every notion is a class of observable facts. This amounted to saying, what in fact positivists have always tried more or less consistently to say, that scientific thought has no presuppositions.”


And so the positivists became proponents of a certain type of metaphysics while they maintained either that metaphysics did not exist, or was impossible, or should be swept away.


XV A Positivist Misinterpretation of Plato


This chapter is a digression on some Oxford Platonists who distorted Plato's thought to make it mean the opposite of his intention and to agree with John Stuart Mill. He commented, as an aside, on the lengths to which commentators will go to make their author talk good sense (as they see it) "which after all is nothing compared with the length to which a hostile reader will go in order to satisfy the desire to make out that his author is talking nonsense, especially if his hostility is not quite openly acknowledged, even to himself".


XVI Suicide of Positivist Metaphysics


Mr Ayer is selected as an example of an anti-metaphysician who has no understanding of the nature and function of presuppositions, with the result that he attacks psuedo-metaphysics instead of the real thing. He mistakes suppositions for propositions and inquires after their truth or verifiability instead of looking at the problem situation to find the function that they serve.


Ethics and theology are singled out as specially pressing cases of the metaphysics that is to be eliminated but the positivists' notions of ethics and theology bear little relation to the subjects as practiced by the greats. They possibly derive from foolish parents or nurses and are coloured by feelings of resentment against the humiliations of childhood in "what is called a virtuous and religious home".


The positivists see metaphysics as threatening to science, and they see criticisms of positivist science as part of an attempt by metaphysics to destroy science. But in so far as metaphysics is concerned with the absolute presuppositions of science, and attempts to find out what these are at a given time, then the positivist attack can only damage science "in proportion to its own degree of success...Any attack on metaphysics is an attack on the foundations of science; any attack on the foundations of science is an attack on science itself".


“This is the real danger of the 'logical positivist' attack on metaphysics, and may conceivably be the real motive behind it. It is a mass of inconsistencies and confusions; but one thing which it may very well serve to express is an aspiration towards the destruction of science and its supersession by the most recklessly unscientific kind of thought”.


PART III EXAMPLES


THE EXISTENCE OF GOD


He is concerned with a question about the history of thought in the fourth century AD, and especially with the Christian belief in God at that time. He suggests that civilisation and science require a special metaphysical framework and suitable institutions to perpetuate this framework. If the special absolute presuppositions are lost there is no way that we could be sure of recreating them. If they persist then science could be fairly swiftly rebuilt even if all records of its achievements were lost.


'The guardianship of the European "scientific frame of mind" is vested in the religious institutions of European civilisation'.


He suggests that the invention of monotheism was decisive for science because it made possible the idea of 'one world' which hangs together under the same set of principles; hence the disciplines can relate to each other instead of describing different worlds that are not penetrable by rival specialists.


“In a polymorphic science there is no sense in calling one science nearly or distantly akin to another. They are all just different. If anybody after a training in one science began to study another, his previous training would be valueless; he would have to start again at the beginning”.


Thales initiated a reform movement towards a monotheistic science and Aristotle's Metaphysics is the high-water mark of this reformation. However his own metaphysics fell into error, especially his belief that merely by using our senses we learn that a natural world exists; he mistook a presupposition for a fact. According to Collingwood this error was corrected by Christianity, by the Patrists who formulated the metaphysics of the 'Catholic Faith' which provided the main or fundamental presuppositions of natural science ever since. This did not happen in time to save Rome which was weakened internally by metaphysical error.


In speaking of the Holy Trinity in respect of the natural sciences, they meant, by belief in the Father, that there is one world of nature. By believing in the Son they meant that this world is a multiplicity of natural realms. “By believing in the Holy Ghost they meant absolutely presupposing that the world of nature, throughout its entire fabric, is a world not merely of things but of events or movements”.


Collingwood claims that the presuppositions that make up the 'Catholic Faith' have provided the metaphysical background for Western thought, including scientific thought, from the fourth century to the present day. It appears that one could subscribe to the metaphysics without having to swallow the theology as well, and so a task for modern scholars is to pick the various strands of metaphysics and theology apart.

THE METAPHYSICS OF KANT


XXII Kant's Problem and the Problem of Today


Kant's view of metaphysics was:
(1) It is concerned with God, freedom and immortality.
(2) It is an inquiry that cannot be avoided by people of integrity because we are bound to make assumptions about these things; the question is whether our assumptions are good or bad.
(3) The people of his time who attacked metaphysics were not friends of science because they really attacked the foundations of all knowledge.
(4) Metaphysicians were to blame for this because they misunderstood both their problems and their methods.
(5) Better metaphysics could not be found until errors were cleared away.


XXIII Metaphysics and Critical Philosophy


Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to review the problem situation in metaphysics “very much as a man might approach any difficult problem in any kind of science by reviewing the more important attempts to solve it; asking how far they had succeeded and why they had not succeeded more completely; considering the state in which they had left the problem; and in general making quite sure he knew what the problem was that he wanted to solve, and upon what conditions he would be able to claim in the future that he had solved it”.


238 Looking at maths and physics, Kant decided that they had progressed when they got past the point of making measurements and observations and got to the stage of "arguing out the consequences of assumptions" (in maths) and "asking questions and demanding answers to them" (in science).


A similarly systematic approach is needed in metaphysics.


Popper described Kant's philosophy as an attempt to account for the phenomenal success of Newtonian physics which had apparently found 'the Truth'. Kant's quest was to explain how such final Truth could be found.


XXIV Metaphysics as Transcendental Analytics


Kant's transcendental analytics was a historical study of the absolute presuppositions used by natural scientists from Galileo to his own time. This limited frame was a characteristic of his time, even of the keenest students of history such as Voltaire and Hume. In the following four chapters Collingwood sets out to show how Kant's Transcendental Analytics can be read as a history of the absolute presuppositions of natural science from Galileo to Kant himself.


XXV Axioms of Intuition


Collingwood thought that Kant was quite wrong in his analysis due to a lack of historical perspective. Kant did not realise the limitation of treating the metaphysics of his own time as the ultimate or the only possible metaphysics (possibly due to his belief that Newton had come up with the ultimate theory in physics).



Kant grouped his subject matter under four heads of which the first is 'axioms of intuition'. These are a set of presuppositions based on the idea that natural science can be regarded as applied mathematics.
The impact of Newton is clearly apparent in this assumption, though Collingwood points out that this is a view shared by Pythagoras and Plato - i.e. all science is mathematical.

This principle is at odds with the Aristotelian metaphysics which sees the world as a world of 'qualities' rather than numbers.

'The God of Plato "always geometrizes". The natural science of the Renaissance represents a Pythagorian-Platonist reaction against the Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages; and Galileo's pronouncement that the book of nature is written by God in the language of mathematics was a deliberate echo of Plato's and a declaration of war on the Aristotelians'.

Collingwood considered that this revival of Platonism in a world that had gone Aristotelian requires explanation. The revival was not complete, with Aristotelian principles holding out among biologists and naturalists in spite of eighteenth century materialism (and reductionism). Also the revival is not pure, because genuine Platonism did not permit precision in the world of real (changeable) things.

Christianity changed this by making it a matter of faith that the world of nature should be regarded as a realm of precision, and so amenable to mathematical description. Galileo's principle still holds (1940) with scientists believing that their field is more scientific the more it approximates to applied mathematics. Though there is a symbol of revolt with the idea that laws of nature are 'statistical' and not absolute.

“The biological controversy between ‘mechanists’ and ‘vitalists’ is in effect a struggle between Platonists and Aristotelians, friends of applied mathematics and friends of quality, for the last citadel of Aristotelian natural science. To the mere spectator, there seems to be evidence that the "mechanists" are winning”.

C

CAUSATION

XXIX Three Senses of the Word 'Cause'

I The free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent.
II A state of affairs which we can manipulate to make things happen (or prevent things from happening).
III A one-one linkage of causal priority between events.
Type I is the historical sense of causation where people and their decisions are the focus of interest. Type II applies in the world of practical affairs and technology, of engineering and medicine.

Type III applies in the theoretical sciences of nature, and it is here that various forms of confusion arise, unlike the case with I and II which Collingwood suggests are straightforward and easy to understand. It may be that things have gone downhill since he wrote because the notion of free and deliberate acts by responsible agents has been eroded by various forms of historical and psychological determinism.

As he suggested in chapter VII the scientific notion of causation (and hence the whole structure of science) is under strain due to incompatible elements that go to make up the definition of type III causation.

XXX Causation in History

XXXI Causation in Practical Natural Science

Type II causation has elements of I and III about it because it involved deliberate choices (type I) and it also makes use of type III regularities.

XXXII Causation in Theoretical Natural Sciences

This type of causation is independent of human agents and their perceptions or wishes. A necessary cause of type III produces its effect "no matter what else exists or does not exist...the relation between cause and effect is a one-one relation. There can be no relativity of causes, and no diversity of effects due to fulfillment or non-fulfillment of conditions".

This he described as a tight sense of causation in contrast with the loose causation of type II. For example if he sets fire to a time fuse and in five minutes there occurs an explosion, lighting the fuse is a loose cause of the explosion because intermediate steps are required (the burning of the fuse).
There is another form of tightness involved; the one-one relation must be simultaneous, so there is no difference in time between cause and effect.

He put the question; what does it really mean to talk about causes producing effects in the tight sense?

The rationalist and empiricist answers.

(i) The rationalist says "necessitation means implication". A cause is a ground and the effect stands in a logical relation to it. But this breaks down as a programme because the causal propositions advanced by modern science cannot be obtained by pure thought from first principles. Hence the need for observation and experiment.

(ii) The empiricist says "necessitation means observed uniformity of conjunction", as described by Hume.

(iii) Earl Russell (in an account which Collingwood greatly admires) says "necessary is a predicate of a propositional function meaning that it is true for all possible values of its argument or arguments". Collingwood calls this a "functional" theory and rejects it on two grounds, first it implies the rationalist or implicational theory that he has rejected, second he is not happy with Russell's use of 'necessary'. This may become clearer when we pursue Collingwood's thoughts on anthropomorphism in physics.

Collingwood suggests that when we talk about causation in a tight sense we mean more than logical implication and more than uniformity of conjunction; this something "is in the nature of compulsion" (which is certainly implied in talk of natural laws, especially in so far as these are different from man-made laws that can be broken).

Compulsion is something that we learn about in our social life and we tend to apply this notion in a metaphorical way to our relations with natural things, and to the relations that they have among themselves.

He suggested that there is an anthropomorphic tradition in natural science that arose from animistic theories of nature. The animistic concept of causation persisted when mechanism replaced animism in modern physics, so Newton used a whole vocabulary which ascribed to 'causes' a kind of power that properly applies to one human inducing another to act in a certain kind of way.
Modern physics has developed the Newtonian doctrine to eliminate causes altogether; so of the two Newtonian classes of events:

(a) those that happen according to law and (b) those that happen as the result of causes, class (a) has swallowed (b) entirely.

XXXIII Causation in Kantian Philosophy

Collingwood claimed that Kant over-reached himself by sweeping into one bag the Baconian tradition (type II causes), the Cartesian identification of type III causes with grounds, the Leibnitian law of sufficient reason and the Humian concept as causes as events prior in time to the effect.

“and, neglecting the one thing in Newton which modern physics has found most valuable, namely the doctrine that what happens according to a law happens without a cause, devised a doctrine which was soon accepted as orthodox. The central points are three.”

(a) That every event has a cause. (b) That the cause of an event is a previous event. (c) That (a) and (b) are known to us a priori.

So according to Collingwood, Kant ended up with a metaphysical theory of causation that was incoherent. His two suppositions do not hang together, or do so only under "a pressure which must produce a somewhat violent strain in the resulting structure".

In so far as these suppositions were widely accepted, the fabric of science based upon them was in a dangerously unstable condition. The hatred of metaphysics among modern scientists may reflect a sense of insecurity due to this situation.
Collingwood poses two metaphysical dilemmas, the anthropocentric dilemma (brought to light in the late 19th century) and the anthropomorphic dilemma which lies deeper and is less understood.

1. Two solutions to the anthropocentric dilemma

(a) The natural scientist is trying to build a practical or experimental science of the Baconian type, using type II causation. [This sounds like instrumentalism; if it predicts OK it is OK]. Success spells out in bending nature to our own purposes.

(b) The scientist wants to construct a theoretical science of nature, gaining knowledge about the world in itself, regardless of what man has done or may hope to do by manipulating it.

334 Since Kant 1(b) has been replaced by 1(a).
2. Two solutions to the anthropomorphic dilemma.
Do we presuppose that the world is animated by something like a human mind or psyche?
(a) The first answer is that nature only becomes intelligible to man by use of analogies drawn from the conscious life of man.
(b) The second answer is that such analogies confuse the issue and a well-devised vocabulary would avoid them. Nature does not devise, adapt or invent things to bring about her ends, only humans do this and the scientist should seek explanations in terms of physical and chemical processes.

2(b) was the orthodox view at Kant's time. Natural science was opposed to anthropomorphism (the 'a' response) and pinned its faith to type III causation as its best weapon. But this contained an element of anthrophmorphism that could only be detected by metaphysical analysis; because this was barred, anthropomorphism persisted at the core of natural science. This is a dangerous situation for science especially while the anti-metaphysicians remain in the ascendant and so block the work that is required for metaphysical house-cleaning.

So while the sciences continue to make spectacular progress they are threatened by defective metaphysics.

Escape from Leviathan

J C Lester, Escape From Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy Reconciled. Macmillan (London) and St Martin’s Press (New York). 2000.

This book probably represents a landmark in the literature of liberalism on two counts. One is these is the robust statement of his major thesis on the compatibility of free markets, liberty and welfare. The other is the way he uses the non-authoritarian theory of rationality expounded by Karl Popper and William W Bartley.

Recognition of Popper has been slow to come in libertarian circles because his views on the protective function of the state and his critique of anti-interventionism have placed him beyond the pale. He has been equally marginalised in the mainstream of philosophy because his theory of conjectural objective knowledge is completely out of step with the theories of justified belief which preoccupy the academic professionals.

William W Bartley (1935-1990), along with Gerard Radnitzky, was one of the first to see the potential for a merger of Popper’s ideas with Hayekian liberalism (though it should be remembered that Popper was one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society). At the time of Bartley’s death he was simultaneously managing the project to produce a new, uniform edition of Hayek’s work, and collecting information for the authorised biographies of both Popper and Hayek. In this book Jan Lester provides a brief critique of some of Popper’s political principles and with this understood it is possible to move on to appreciate the value of other aspects of his thought, as Lester has done.

His statement of the extreme compatibility thesis runs as follows:

“In practice (rather than in imaginary cases) and in the long term, there are no systematic clashes among interpersonal liberty, general welfare, and market anarchy, where these terms are to be understood roughly as follows: ‘interpersonal liberty’ is ‘not being imposed on by others’; ‘general welfare’ is ‘people having their unimposed wants satisfied’; ‘market anarchy’ is ‘unrestricted libertarian trade’; and the underpinning conception of ‘rationality’ is ‘agents always attempt to achieve what they most want under the perceived circumstances’ “(page 2).

Those who seek linguistic precision may be alarmed that his terms are to be understood roughly. Lester has quite deliberately avoided the kind of conceptual analysis, the teasing out of the meaning of terms, that Popper has labelled “essentialism”. An anonymous reviewer for Amazon Books noted the remarkable amount of meat that is packed into the book. This is partly due to the self-conscious avoidance of essentialism, partly to Lester’s firm grasp on his materials and party to the mode of argumentation that he has adopted, following the non-justificationist or non-foundational line that has been articulated by Popper and Bartley.

The main characteristic of this approach is that it only attempts to achieve what is possible, which is the formation of a critical preference for one option rather than another, in the light of the evidence and arguments that are available up to date. He does not attempt the impossible, namely a logically conclusive proof of his case. What is possible is to propose a theory or a doctrine and subject it to criticism, then if it stands up we may proceed with that theory or doctrine until such time as an alternative is proposed that has better credentials and stands up to criticism at least as well as the previous candidate.

The author points out that this has resulted in a book that is full of other people’s criticisms of liberty, anarchy and free trade, with his rejoinders. Some reader has described this as a “set them up and knock them down” method, to which he replies that he does not regard this as a valid criticism, it is precisely what critical rationalists, and indeed everyone else, should be doing. This may be contrasted with those who use the justificationist method to “build it up (yet again) and ignore the counter-arguments”.

Another extremely interesting feature of Lester’s case is his avoidance of moral advocacy. Moral advocacy is of course the overwhelming feature of most of the anti-libertarian literature, including that of fellow travellers with libertarianism like myself (prior to reading this book) who have agonised over the moral choices that need to be made in trade-offs between liberty and welfare. But of course the central claim of this book is that liberty and welfare, properly understood, are compatible so there is no need for a trade off in principle.

Lester’s point on moral advocacy is made with a particularly elegant example of two hypothetical neighbouring tribes, one which condemns the eating of any animals without hearts, the other condemning the eating of any animals without kidneys. They dispute to the point of warfare over which animals should be eaten, until an anthropologist (trained in biology) explains that all animals have either both heart and kidneys, or neither. Lester’s point is that the anthropologist does not need to take sides in the debate. Similarly there is no need for him to take sides in any debate over the trade-offs between liberty, welfare and anarchy.

Turning to the organization of the book, after the Introduction are four chapters; Rationality, Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy. Each chapter is tightly organised and packed with arguments which are crisply presented and so resist efforts to paraphrase them. Consequently the selection of points to cover in this review will not do full justice to the contents of the book or its organisation. Lester’s theory of rationality has to reconcile two extreme views in economics – the neglected subjective, a priori approach (pace Menger and the Austrians) and the standard objective, empirical account. He adopts the theory that agents are self-interested utility-maximisers and he addresses a number of standard objections that are raised against this concept. He argues, successfully in my view, that the objections do no damage to his thesis. The notion of the self-interested utility-maximiser is not vitiated, for analytical purposes or for economic theory, by the fact that the self may be malleable and not fixed in its aims and preferences, that self-interest is compatible with altruism and even self-sacrifice, that utility cannot be interpreted in terms of a single motive or goal.

So far as economic theory is concerned he defends, though not exclusively, the use of a priori rationality by Mises and Kirzner and he hopes that his broader philosophical account is complementary. He is encouraged to note “the remarkable British phenomenon of Marxian (anti-money) socialists who master the economic calculation argument only to find themselves intellectually catapulted, past various state-interventionist ideologies, to market anarchy” (instancing David Ramsay Steele).

Liberty is formulated as the absence of initiated or proactively imposed cost, or in the case of a mutual clash of imposed costs, the minimisation of imposed costs. This means avoiding or minimising the subjective costs imposed on us by other people, without our consent. Lester explains this formulation, compares it with typical libertarian alternatives to illustrate its strengths and then tests it by attempting to solve some problems presented to libertarians by David Friedman and John Gray. This is the longest chapter and it covers a huge amount of ground, including intellectual property rights and a theory of restitution for crimes and torts. In addition to the criticism of Friedman and Gray there is also a rejoinder to Amartya Sen and to Karl Popper.

Lester admits at the outset that his formulation of liberty may seem rather obscure and he hopes that it will become clearer through its application in this chapter. This is consistent with his theory that principles gain meaning from application to cases and problems, not by extended definition of the terms used to state them. Among the potential criticisms that might be advanced, he notes Sen’s paper on the impossibility of a Paretian Liberal, where Sen argues that a prude suffers a cost or imposition from knowing that somewhere in the world people are reading literature that the prude either does not like, or thinks will lead to ill effects. The subjective cost imposed on the prude is real, like the cost imposed on libertarians by the publishers who print socialist/conservative tracts, vandals who circulate instructions on the design of terrorist devices, sports writers who extol the merits of teams other than the one we support, but these costs are trivial compared with the costs imposed by censorship (remember that Lester is aiming for minimisation of costs where they cannot be entirely avoided). Lester suggests that Sen has confused definitions in this area and he proceeds to argue that Murray Rothbard and David Friedman are similarly misguided in their accounts of coercion.

The criticism of John Gray is important because for some time he enjoyed a high profile as a rare instance of a classical liberal Oxford don. Lately he decided that liberalism in its libertarian form will not do because he has “examined and found wanting all the major justificatory strategies in the project of constructing a liberal ideology” (quoted on page 143). This is a supposed to be something like a knockout blow, but Lester points out that no doctrine can achieve conclusive justification and so the blow simply misses the target. Lester also responds to Gray’s charge of “restrictivism”, directed at liberals on the ground that they (along with other restrictivists) do not accept that freedom is “an essentially contested concept”, and they “endorse naïve and superseded positions in the philosophy of mind and action and in the theory of our knowledge of the social world” (quoted on page 124).

In response, Lester accuses Gray of “conflationism”, that is, importing a raft of contentious theories from elsewhere (psychology, hermeneutics, epistemology) to muddle and confuse the issues, at the same time appealing to various authorities and ultimately overriding interpersonal liberty in favour of some other goal. Gray dismisses the liberal quest for “a single aboriginal right” and he seems to believe that liberalism cannot stand up in a society that lacks a “single cultural tradition…undergirding the institutions of civil society” (quoted on page 128). Lester argues convincingly that these objections do not undermine the argument of this book, any more than the lack of conclusive justification. In view of the sharp rejoinder that Lester has administered, it is interesting to read the comment from Gray that is printed on the dust jacket. “Even those who are unpersuaded by [this] reformulation of classical liberalism will benefit from reading Lester’s book”.

Welfare is a sticking point for many people of good will who support freedom but believe that they cannot be libertarians because of all the poor people who need assistance. Actually support for deserving poor people could be provided by a VWA (Voluntary Welfare Association), dispensing funds from voluntary donations from all the people who currently vote to support welfare policies. Serious socialists would set the example by donating all surplus wealth and income above the national average. I have run this idea past some socialists but they are not enthused because they think that the rich would be too mean to contribute. This view is amply refuted by the evidence of charitable donation, especially the way that donations increase when taxes are lowered.

We come to Lester’s chapter on welfare after his lengthy excursion through the theory of liberty. In this chapter he addresses his compatibility thesis more broadly to show that welfare is indeed compatible with liberty, anarchy and free markets. First he outlines the relationship among welfare, liberty and the market, then he clarifies the conception of “want-satisfaction welfare”, followed by discussion of some practical and economic implications of this concept, then he examines the relationship of welfare to private property.

Some conceptual ground-clearing is required in this chapter because Lester notes that “preference utilitarianism” (the notion of welfare as want satisfaction) which he favours is often misunderstood in two important ways. “First, people conflate hedonistic utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism (so much so, that when the distinction is made clear, they deny that preference utilitarianism is utilitarianism at all). Second, people assume, and even insist, that utilitarianism is necessarily collectivistic in its policy implications, when it must logically be an empirical matter whether collectivism will increase utility overall – and I shall argue that it does not do so” (page 156).

The main targets in this chapter are R M Hare, Amartya Sen, Bernard Williams, John Rawls, John Harsanyi and Alan Ryan. Sen and Williams wrote that utilitarianism imposes “severe informational constraints” (quoted on p 161) and takes “a remarkably narrow view of being a person” (p 162). The “drastic obliteration of usable information” is supposed to result in the “neglect of a person’s attachments and ties”. Further, utilitarianism regards “attachments, ties, aims, plans, agency, etc…as worthless in themselves and valuable only to the extent of their effects on utility” (p 163). Lester replies that the wants and values of the agent are simply a personal function of their appraisal of all these things listed by Sen and Williams, reflecting a measure of the worth that they place on them, and this individual measure is respected by preference utilitarianism, if not by other schools of thought with different axes to grind.

This mention of axes to grind brings us to John Rawls and his theory of justice. One of the objectionable features of utilitarianism for Rawls is the supposed sacrifice of some people’s welfare to maximise aggregate welfare. He desires to produce more acceptable (‘fair’) principles, without sacrifice of the individual. Lester notes that Rawls does advocate sacrifice of the individual to some extent, by appropriating a share of a trade between Tom and Sophie for the benefit of Harry. “Rawls does defend such scenarios, and thereby advocates the very thing (the sacrifice of some people’s interests for others) for which he rejects utilitarianism (albeit mistakenly)” (166). He notes that Rawls’s conception of liberty is inherently political (and egalitarian), without regard for the consequences of economic policies designed to achieve egalitarian ends. One might say that Rawls does not want to let the facts get in the way of a ‘good’ (statist and redistributional) theory.

John Harsanyi is taken to task for “conflationism”, rather like John Gray, running together stipulative definitions, factual theses and value judgements, attempting to combine philosophy and mathematics with the appearance of great rigor, all at a very abstract level. Harsanyi claims to be a preference utilitarian and to maintain the principle of “preference autonomy” whereby the ultimate criteria of what is good for the individual are his own wants and preferences. So far, so good, but Lester goes on to describe the limitations and qualifications that Harsanyi places on the process of forming preferences. Access is required to “all the relevant information” and so on, in order to arrive at “true preferences”. For Lester this is a paternalistic and self-serving notion to prop up political interests of an egalitarian kind.

The final chapter on anarchy is very short because most of the work to defend private property and the market order has been done in previous chapters. “Basic conceptual confusion and mere prejudice are more the real problems” (page 193). He casts a critical eye over some conceptual aspects of the state and then he turns to John Rawls again as an exemplar of confusion and prejudice. He notes that states do not have the explicit consent of their subjects, and he does not accept Locke’s argument that we tacitly consent to the state by remaining in its territory. Because of its ultimate monopoly on power, the state is able to coercively impose control over persons and property. Even the explicjt consent of a majority to this state of affairs is not acceptable to a libertarian. He suggests that the reality of this situation obscured by democratic prejudice. “The fact that the majority is often positively enthusiastic to have a state only disguises the illiberal coercion for people who think that democracy is somehow inherently liberal” (p 195). He agrees with the arguments that have been advanced by Murray Rothbard and David Friedman on the superiority and stability of anarchic law and order. The current state of play in the “war on drugs” provides massive evidence of the downside of State activities in this domain. He briefly notes the argument that nationalism is a powerful ideology, based on the idea that a society or a culture needs its own state for purposes of identity (perhaps during the Olympic Games?). Lester responds with the hope that in time the propaganda tool of the state will be replaced by two things: “A depoliticised affection for ones geographical home and culture [the proud Tasmanian] and a moral affirmation of liberty…As an anarchist, I therefore have no ideological nationality” (page 198).

Finally, Lester identifies the way that Rawls has simply ignored the libertarian position on the state, which is perceived as providing the arena where the most divisive issues can be removed from the political agenda. This could conceivably be the case in Plato’s republic, the totalitarian state where the rulers have been rigorously brainwashed from an early age, where only the rulers and their auxiliaries may carry arms, where there is no trade with other states (in case subversive ideas come from outside, along with the goods) and those who dissent can be killed or banished. Until this ‘Utopian’ situation is achieved, the state will be the chief cause of discord as contending interests battle to control it for their various ends.

“Rawls is altogether representative of so-called liberals (in the modern sense). None of them takes liberty (in the sense of not being imposed on by others) seriously and so cannot see its compatibility with welfare and anarchy. They are more interested in defending inherently political ‘liberties’ or ‘rights’. But ‘liberties’ and ‘rights’ that are inconsistent with liberty have pernicious unintended consequences” (page 204).

Lester concludes with some optimistic remarks on the intellectual resurgence of private-property ideas in recent years. Escape from Leviathan an inspiring contribution to this movement and his replies to major figures such as Gray, Rawls and Sen should exert a decisive effect in future debates in political economy. This is a fine achievement, to produce a book that requires so much close reading, in stark contrast with contemporary works in philosophy, politics and political economy which can be thrown aside after a few paragraphs or even on the basis of the dust jacket blurb where fundamentally unsustainable premises are expressed.

Some comments on the book as an artifact. It is attractively produced with a striking cover design, excellent binding, a highly readable font and attractive layout. Numbered subheadings help the reader to keep track of the very intricate construction of each chapter. The main text runs to 204 pages followed by over 200 notes, before the bibliography and the index. The bibliography is comprehensive but not overwhelming.

Afterthoughts: Some concluding comments on the seismic potential for the form of critical rationalism that Lester has adopted from Popper and Bartley. Liberalism (or libertarianism) is a non-authoritarian creed. It draws its strength from the non-coercive power of reasoned argument, in contrast with systems that depend on brute force or on intimidation by intellectual or moral authorities. The survival and progress of liberalism depends on a free market in ideas, unconstrained by the cramps on trade (in criticism) that are imposed by cartels, monopolies and various forms of protectionism in the mind industry. For an account of these cartels at work, see Bartley’s book Unfathomed Knowledge: Unmeasured Wealth, reviewed here.

People tend to be hostages to the first ideas that they take on board, altered on occasion by shifts of allegiance which occur by processes akin to religious conversion. This has hardly changed with the advent of mass primary, secondary and lately higher education. Clearly education and instruction alone do not furnish the habits and disciplines of critical and imaginative thinking that are required for continuing intellectual growth. Elsewhere I have argued that Bartley and Popper have created a major shift in the Western tradition of rationality, a shift which immensely strengthens the philosophy of non-socialist liberalism.

True lovers of freedom have always been forced to work against the authoritarian grain of Western thought because the dominant intellectual traditions, rationalist and irrationalist alike, sponsor dogmatism and intolerance. Even those who challenge this authoritarian heritage usually share a powerful and unconscious assumption with their opponents. Bartley labelled this theory "justificationism" and liberals help to sustain opposition to their cause if they propagate this theory. This is explained in a this paper.

One of the consequences of the authoritarian or justificationist tradition of rationalism is exemplified in the rifts and schisms among the followers of Ayn Rand, where factions fell out in the futile and self-destructive manner of doctrinaire left-wing groupings. These tendencies should cease when the implications of the Popper/Bartley innovation are developed and disseminated, as Lester has done in this book.